Rick Casey: So many Latinos, so few elected

Commentary: So many Latinos, so few elected

Published 5:30 am, Monday, July 18, 2011

More Hispanics than Anglos live in Harris County, and by a large margin.

According to the recent census, 41 percent of us are Hispanic, 33 percent Anglo and 18 percent African-American.

Yet Harris County has not a single Hispanic congressman.

Nor is there a single Hispanic on the four-member county commission, since Sylvia Garcia was swept out of a seat drawn for Hispanic representation.

Garcia contributed to her own loss. A week before Election Day, she had $1.1 million in her campaign chest. Voter turnout in her Precinct 2 was the lowest of the four precincts, and a million bucks could have bought a lot of turnout.

That's water under the bridge. The question now is whether new lines being drawn as part of the post-census redistricting will make it easier or harder for a Hispanic candidate to recapture the seat in 2014.

"We're still a majority Hispanic precinct, just like we were in 2000, the last time the lines were drawn," said Commissioner Jack Morman, the Republican who defeated Garcia last November.

It is a classic political statement, both true and misleading. The fact is the new lines would produce a precinct that is both less Hispanic and more Republican than it is now.

The total population of the proposed new precinct is 57 percent Hispanic and 31 percent Anglo. But the voting age population is just 52.5 percent Hispanic to 35.7 percent Anglo.

And when you look further, at the numbers of citizens of voting age, the ratio changes dramatically. Estimates are that only 38 percent are Hispanic, and 50 percent are Anglo.

According to Columbia Law School Professor Nathaniel Persily, an expert on the Voting Rights Act, Justice Department lawyers who will review the new lines will look at total population and voting age population.

"However, the DOJ specifically asked for a special tabulation from the Census Bureau for citizen voting age population, as derived from the American Community Survey averages from 2005 to 2009," he said.

There may be a bigger problem with something called retrogression. Some county officials point out that the proposed precinct has a higher percentage of Hispanics than it did in 2000.

That's true, but both Persily and Steve Bickerstaff, who teaches voting law at the University of Texas law school and has a thriving practice in the field, agree that the law doesn't measure retrogression from 10 years ago, but from the precinct as it now stands.

It's complicated

By that measure, the proposed lines raise the percentage of Anglos by about 3 percent and lower Hispanic numbers by about the same.

What's more, the precinct would be substantially more Republican than it is today.

Democrat Bill White carried the current precinct in last year's governor's race by 49.4 to 48.7 percent. But Gov. Rick Perry carried the proposed precinct by 52.6 to 45.6 percent.

So is this a clear case of gerrymandering to protect an incumbent?

Richard Murray, a University of Houston political scientist who has never been accused of right-wing sympathies and who was a key consultant in drawing the lines, says it's more complicated than that.

Richard Murray, a University of Houston political scientist who has never been accused of right-wing sympathies and who was a key consultant in drawing the lines, says it's more complicated than that.

"Incumbents weighed in for sure," he said. "They always do."

But he said a bigger issue was at play. Under the one-man-one-vote principle, which takes precedence over such considerations as retrogression, Precinct 2 had to add thousands of voters to become roughly the same size as Precincts 3 and 4.

But, said Murray, 90 percent of Precinct 2's border is with Commissioner El Franco Lee's Precinct 1. It also needed more population and is a "protected" district.

Follow it to court

To take precincts that included both blacks and Hispanics to bolster Precinct 2 would cause Precinct 1 to have to add more Anglos from its other borders and to retrogress regarding its black population.

So the new population for Precinct 2 had to be drawn mainly from Commissioner Jerry Eversole's decidedly Republican precinct.

Murray also cautioned against relying on the citizen voting population numbers, since they are survey averages going back to 2005. Many immigrant workers returned home in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, he noted.

Look for these issues to play out in court. Whatever the resolution, Hispanics will continue to struggle to gain representation approaching the numbers their citizens merit.

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